Multicore software writers get free guide

LONDON – The Multicore Association, a not-for-profit industry body, has produced a 114-page guide to writing multicore-ready software, with a particular emphasis on embedded applications.

The Multicore Programming Practices Guide has been authored by nearly a dozen industry and academic experts including representatives from Wind River Systems, Intel, CriticalBlue and Mentor Graphics. The guide outlines how to migrate applications to multicore platforms and shares techniques that help reduce development costs. It outlines an evolutionary approach from the traditional use of serial high-level C/C++ and includes best practices for writing multicore-ready software using C/C++ without extensions, ensuring that the application can be more easily compiled across a range of multicore processor platforms.

"While the industry continues to make important long-term research into new programming languages and methodologies, the MPP guide tackles how existing embedded C/C++ code may be written to be ‘multicore ready’ today," said Multicore Association president Markus Levy, in a statement.

The guide is the result of four years work by a working group set up by the Multicore Association under co-chairs David Stewart, CEO of CriticalBlue, and Robert Oshana, engineering manager at Freescale Semiconductor.

The Multicore Programming Practices Guide (MPP) is available for download from the Multicore Association website.